What criteria do you use when selecting materials?

Please provide at least two

contexts or scenarios.
The first thing to take into consideration when choosing materials is the reason why
the learner is studying English; for example, if it is to study English in a UK university,
then specialist EAP materials can be used, or a general textbook like Headway might
be useful for a holiday English survival course. If these materials were to be
swapped between the courses, it would be difficult for the learners to develop the
desired language skills.
The next consideration is the level of the learner. According to Krashen (1992), the
level of the target language in a lesson should be slightly above that of the learner in
order for them to be able to acquire what is being taught. The material needs to be
pitched at the correct level; too easy, the learners may become bored and switch off,
too difficult, they may become confused and give up.
These are the main considerations and the teacher can modify the materials as
needed. There is no ‘perfect’ teaching material, or at least I have not seen it yet, as it
will always need to be tailored to the needs of the learners. For example, it may be
too reliant on group work, which may need to be adjusted in a smaller class, or there
may be too many grammar exercises and too little communication. These types of
things can always be altered according to the needs of the group, as long as the
original material being used is teaching the desired type of English and the level is
appropriate for the learners in question.
For example, the book ‘Academic Writing’ by Bailey (2014). This book is used on
EAP courses and does a reasonable job in explaining some aspects of academic
writing. This is useful for teaching on an EAP course because a range of key
concepts are laid out very clearly, but the learners are likely to switch off because the
tasks are very formulaic and do not give much opportunity for group work or
interaction. However, the content of the book is fundamentally sound and can easily
be changed by integrating some other types of activities.
Another example is the book ‘Skillful’. This is pitched as an EAP book, and has lots
of communicative activities and multimedia exercises. However, there are very few
opportunities for learners to develop their academic English skills, and the book is
actually mostly concerned with the development of academic vocabulary only. The
core content of the book is not likely to prepare the learners for academic life and
would probably not be useful material to use for a lesson even with substantial
modification.
Bailey, S. (2014). Academic writing: A handbook for international students.
Routledge.
Bixby, J. (2013). Skillful Reading & Writing 3. Macmillan.
Krashen, S. (1992). The Input Hypothesis: An Update. Linguistics and language
pedagogy: The state of the art, 409-431.